DailyDirt: Cameras For Science

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Mon, Dec 19th 2011 5:00pm — Michael Ho

You almost can't make it to the cover of a major scientific publication like Science or Nature without a really cool picture to present your data. It seems that everyone likes pretty pictures, even scientists. So here are a few science projects with some interesting camera equipment.

The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has created the largest digital camera ever -- at a cost of about $165 million. This 3.2 gigapixel camera will be used in a new telescope being built on a Chilean mountaintop. [url]
Modifying a cheap digital camera to take infrared pictures was only part of a project aimed at mapping the photosynthetic activity around Asheville, North Carolina. Putting the cameras on balloons and merging the pictures together with Photosynth has created a nice collection of data for studying environmental and economic sustainability issues. [url]
MIT researchers have created a camera system capable of capturing images at a trillion frames per second. It's so fast it can actually track the movement of light as it travels -- under specific conditions, of course. [url]
To discover more interesting photography-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: cameras, data, digital images, photosynth, telescope
Companies: mit, slac

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Anonymous Coward, 19 Dec 2011 @ 5:38pm

way faster than a speeding bullet...
capturing the speed of light with digital cameras seems impressive, but they must do something similar at the LHC, too, right? Smashing elementary particles together and recording what happens must be a pretty near-instantaneous event.
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Jeffrey Nonken (profile), 19 Dec 2011 @ 5:43pm

It's so fast it can actually track the movement of light as it travels -- under specific conditions, of course.

I can just imagine the conditions:

Duuuude! Oh Wow! I can see, like, light and stuff! Eeeeeeeerrrrrrrrmmmmmmm VOOM! It's like, all bright and stuff!

Man this is some good shit!
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Hans, 20 Dec 2011 @ 2:10pm

Ho Ho Ho!
Mr Ho, thank you very much for this most interesting threads...
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- Michael Ho (profile), 20 Dec 2011 @ 3:12pm
  
  Re: Ho Ho Ho!
  You're welcome, Hans. Good to know someone out there likes these somewhat random collections of links!
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